The GOP’s lost generation of millennial voters

By now it’s well known that young Americans are considerably more liberal than the Republican Party on most social issues, particularly gay rights. The GOP’s own 2012 election “autopsy,” which proposed ways to broaden the party’s base, emphasized that Republicans must change their “tone” on social issues that young people see “as the civil rights issues of our time.”

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The latest youth poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics, though, indicates that LGBT-related policies aren’t the only ones on which young people and Republican traditionalists part ways.

As their rabid support for Bernie Sanders might indicate, young people have also become much more supportive of big government and expanded social welfare programs.

Compared with responses from the past few years, today’s 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to believe that “basic health insurance is a right for all people,” that “basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that government should provide to those unable to afford them” and that “the government should spend more to reduce poverty.”

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